There are a few commercial services out there that aim to print your blog for you into book form, but because my blog is so large and some of the formatting is problematic, none of them were able to do what I wanted. So, with the aid of Prince to do the final stage of printing (I can’t recommend this tool enough), plus a couple thousand lines of custom XML parsing code by yours truly, I have a tool that does a beautiful job of converting large blogs into book form, with complete formatting. It does the obvious stuff like turn links into footnotes, but it has some sneaky tricks up its sleeve as well like grabbing thumbnails for embedded videos and reformatting a variety of oldschool-HTML tables, which was important for me since a lot of my entries are old and imported from IAM when you had to do that sort of thing from time to time. Oh, and it has fancy comment inclusion ability as well but after a lot of waffling, I decided not to include comments in this printout.

Anyway, I’ll post more in a couple weeks when I get back the 2011 yearbook that I just ordered (about $60 for a hardcover 236 page letter-size full-color book seemed pretty reasonable), but until then let me really quickly post some screengrabs of the production PDF file:

My tool is WordPress specific, as it works with the XML export dumps, and for now, it’s pretty specific to my blog. Might be most helpful for me to share the custom CSS files I wrote, since they actually do a significant percentage of the work — much of the parsing and cleaning of entries could be done by hand on anything but the largest blogs (which unfortunately includes Zentastic, with thousands of entries). I’m happy to share it and/or the source code if someone wants it, but while it could be useful to others developing XML parsers, specifically for print conversion, I doubt it would be easy to make it work on any old blog.

I will update this post if the software is updated. I’ve tested it extensively and it seems bug-free and stable, but please feel free to contact me with bug reports and feature requests. Contacting me via the forum of this post is my preference but you can email me as well if you want.

DOWNLOAD: http://www.zentastic.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/zencbr-1-000.rar
ARCHIVE AND EXE FILE SIZE: 57,007 bytes and 132,608 bytes (it's tiny!)
VERSION AND COMPILE TIME: 1.0.0.0 30/01/2012

To install the program, just download the zip file and uncompress it somewhere. It could be on your desktop, or “C:\zencbr\”, or anywhere else. It doesn’t really matter. The two text files should be placed in the same directory as the main executable, and when you run the program it will create one more file that it uses to remember your working directory between sessions.

ZenCBR is a command line tool that should in theory be run from the directory you’re processing comics in. That is, ZenCBR should be stored in its own directory (for example C:\ZenCBR\zencbr.exe) but when you run it, you should be in your comics directory. For example, you might change directory — “cd \comics\new” — and then run the program — “c:\zencbr\zencbr”. Alternately, if you’re not a command-line person, you can run the program simply by clicking its icon, and you can change the directory you’re working in by pressing “N” to navigate elsewhere. It will remember this for next time and start in that same directory.

Because it runs in text mode, it may seem threatening at first, but it’s really very very easy to use. The best way to teach yourself is to make a backup copy of some of your comic files and experiment on them to see how the program works. Once you’ve tried it a couple times it should be quite self explanatory. Feel free to ask questions here as well, or by email, although you’re more likely to get a quick answer here, and you can bet that if you are wondering it someone else is too.

Note that unless otherwise noted, all of these commands are executed on files in the current directory as well as all subdirectories in the current directory (and recursively inside them as well). So you can run this on your entire collection at once if you’d like. All the commands generate verbose output and tell you what they are doing, and ask for input when required, and terminate and explain why when they hit error conditions.

D – Find Doubles

You may find that you have multiple copies of comics. For example “comic 1.cbr” and “comic 01.cbr” and “comic 1 (scanned by joe).cbr” might all have the same content. This function attempts to find such doubles. When it finds a set of files that it thinks are duplicates it gives you a list of them, along with their filesize (perhaps you’d like to choose the higest quality version). You can either select the one to keep (the others are deleted) or skip and keep them all.

C – Clean Names

This function attempts to “pretty up” the names of files and directories. For starters, it converts all underscores to spaces. It also attempts to fix a wide range of minor typographical issues to improve readability, including removing double spaces and trailing spaces, hash characters, standardizing brackets and correcting their spacing, fixing lost apostrophes, and correcting spacing around “x of y” numerical phrases.

T – Fix CBR/Z type

A CBR type file is essentially just a standard archive (RAR, ZIP, etc.) that has been renamed to identify it as a comic book archive, which contains a bunch of image files (usually JPGs) of the individual pages of the comic book. The third letter in the extension specifies the type of archive used. For example, CBR means it’s actually a renamed RAR file, and CBZ means it’s actually a renamed ZIP file. There are other formats sometimes supported but they are extremely rare and are basically never used for distribution. That said, you would be amazed how many times I have seen a CBR file that is actually a ZIP, or a CBZ that is actually a RAR. Many viewer programs don’t care, but some will crash when faced with this or erroneously tell you that the file is corrupted. This command goes through your files and makes sure that the extension matches the actual archive file type. If it doesn’t, the file is renamed.

G – Remove groups

Often downloaded files will contain the name of the group that did the scanning. If you’re choosing to download files that have been scanned by others rather than repeating the work and scanning your own comics (since of course you would never download anything you don’t own), you will be left with files that say stuff like “(Minutemen-DCP)” at the end. This function removes the scanning group names. While ZenCBR does come with some training already done, you will need to train the program. When it comes across a term or name that it doesn’t know, it will ask you whether it is a group or if it should be ignored. If you tell it that it’s a group name, it will remove it, and will also remove it any time it sees it in the future. If you tell it to ignore it, it will leave it in place and do the same in the future. If you’re unsure, you can skip it “for today”, meaning that it will ignore it for the rest of this session, but if you run it again, you’ll be reasked. There is an option to run this command in “quick mode”, which skips all questions — if it doesn’t know a term, it just ignores it. Only known groups are processed. Be careful because there is no “undo” on this command. If you make a mistake, you can break out and edit the dictionary files. Their location is displayed when you start the program. They are plain text files that can be edited in notepad or similar programs.

R – Renumber

This command attempts to clean up the numbering schemes so they match. For example, if you have “comic issue 1.cbr” and “comic issue 02.cbr”, they may sort incorrectly because of the different number format. This program would rename the first file “comic issue 01.cbr” so they are consistent. The length of the number (with 0-padding) is determined by finding the longest one in use, and also by checking the “of #” phrase if there is one. For example “comic 3 of 100″ would be renamed “comic 003 of 100″ because ZenCBR knows that eventually it will need three digits. The “of” phrase however gets shortened so there is no 0-padding since it’s not needed there.

S – Sort to Subs

This special command, which not everyone will find use for, is the only one that is not recursive. This command is used when you have a large collection of files in a single directory that are of different series (ie. a bunch of Batman, some Superman, whatever). The program does its best to guess the name of the comic series, creates a directory, and moves all the relevant files into that new directory. Please note that it’s not perfect, so you will definitely need to go through and correct some of the directory names, but it will still save you lots of time.

Finally, to quit, just press either Q or escape from the main menu. You can also press CTRL+BREAK or close the window at any time.

This program was written in PowerBasic Console Compile Version 6.0 which you can purchase at PowerBasic.com and is highly recommended, as are their other compilers. You can download the source code and icon file at this link: http://www.zentastic.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/zencbr-1-000-source.rar (archive size 20,679 bytes).

Finally, please note that this is freeware by me, Shannon Larratt, and is provided with no warranty or guarantees of any kind. Use at your own risk.

Subject: curious if you've heard about krokodil

and if you havent please dont look it up while eating, not sure why but when i heard about this i wondered if you had also

I actually hadn’t heard of it until this email so curiosity made me bite. There’s an article in The Independent called Krokodil: The drug that eats junkies and of course the Desomorphine Wikipedia entry has an introduction, but basically Krokodil is an inexpensive street drug that approximates the chemical structure of heroin by processing over-the-counter Codeine pills with iodine and red phosphorus. Unfortunately no effort is made to purify the drug, so you’re not only getting desomorphine (which isn’t inherently dangerous) but also highly corrosive toxins. These toxins eat away at the drug user’s flesh until it’s dead and gangrenous and literally falling off their body. It’s more horrible than you can possibly imagine, and users have an average lifespan of just a couple years after starting.

The pictures of people doing krokodil make those “Faces of Meth” websites look like a friendly beauty product. They are truly horrific. There is a big over-the-top disgusting photo gallery on Buzzfeed, but there was one awful photo from that page that struck me. Click the image to see it uncensored, or follow that previous link for lots more grossness.

There’s one thing though that really struck me in that photo. The tissue around the exposed bone at the hand end, and around most of its length, actually appears to be healed, as impossible as my gut tells me that is. Not that it looks by any means healthy, and the elbow end of the bone looks positively rotted, but it really goes to show how single-minded I am when my first thought was running through all the body modification possibilities — the idea that it is possible to strip and expose a bone, have it come up and out of the flesh, and actually survive and heal like that is wild. Could you do this with collar bones for example? I found some medical and veterinary and dental references with a quick search but I think it’s complicated because I’m not sure what medical terms to use that will save me from a zillion false positives.

It reminds me of an old story that I remember from about 1995 when (I think) someone I worked with at Stainless Studios (I can’t remember who) told me about someone that came in or someone they knew of — and I can’t tell you this isn’t an urban legend, who had been in some sort of an accident that left him with exposed bone on his scalp. I suppose there are animals that you could argue have exposed bone, so perhaps it’s possible, and these krokodil photos make me think even more that it’s possible. Anyway, the punch line of the story was that this individual had an image placed on the bone through some process akin to scrimshaw. Might be a good thing for someone to include in a steampunk graphic novel or something.

PS. And as a side note, the fact that people are willing to destroy themselves with Krokodil really shows you how much addicts are victimized by their condition… how desperate opiate addiction can make a person both to get back to that place where they felt good, and to get away from soul-crushing withdrawal. It really sucks that the system is far too often set up around a “punishment” mentality rather than a “treatment” mentality.

Ami James of the reality tattoo show NY Ink makes a big deal about wanting to run the best shop in the world with the best artists available, and positions himself as the king of that hill. He constantly belittles and abuses his apprentice — if it’s not all acting for the cameras, he’s a complete asshole to his “friend” — and goes on and on about how incompetent the apprentice is and how much he has to learn before he can call himself a tattoo artist. Problem is Ami James isn’t much of a tattoo artist himself. Sure, he can lay in solid flat color and draw a line that isn’t too shaky, but every single tattooist should be able to do that. Seems to me that Ami James got to the point where he could do the basics and then decided that there was nothing more to learn. Let me give you an example from the most recent show.

A woman came in with a painting that her grandmother had done wanting it put on her skin. She told Ami that what was important to her was that it look “like a painting” and “not like a tattoo”. The only thing she wanted changed was to have a New York skyline added. So what does Ami do? He changes the design in order to make it look “not like a painting” and “like a tattoo”. It’s as if he heard the exact opposite. The color is typical flat shading/blending and most obviously and most glaringly, he gives it the trademark of cheap tattoos everywhere — a heavy black outline.

Just think how great that could have looked if, for starters, the cloud was done in white ink with no outline. Not that it didn’t stop the dumb-ass client from exclaiming, “it’s exactly what I wanted!” Maybe people get the tattoo they deserve, not the tattoo they asked for.

But come on, Ami!!! Can you seriously not do a tattoo that doesn’t have a black outline around the color? Did you learn to tattoo from colouring books? Are you seriously not able to lay in textured color so it looks like paint? These are basic skills. I know that the painting the client brought in isn’t particularly well done either, but come on, this tattoo is crap. Kat Von D must be so happy not to be on the same show as you any more. Why must you make me yell at my television, and then further embarrass myself by writing about it on the Internet? Gawd, I hope one of their producers reads this and hires me to teach Ami how to tattoo. They don’t even have to put me in the credits. I’ll even pay for my ticket down to NYC just to cut down on my irritation level from future shows.

God, the guy couldn’t be more mundane and boring. A good tattoo artist is always learning, always pushing themselves, always improving as an artist — I know that if I was a tattoo artist that landed a TV show, you can bet that I’d be taking every spare moment taking classes — and just practicing new things — to make sure that I don’t look like a fool. In the episode he had the gall to insult his apprentice about not being good at watercolor, and then went and showcased his own small-minded view of what tattooing can be. It’s embarrassing. As I’ve said before, if I want a something that looks like flash from 1995, Ami will surely be able to do a superb job. But if I want anything that can stand up alongside the caliber of art that should be expected these days, forget it. I wouldn’t care if it weren’t for the fact that he continually brags about his status as a tattoo sensei and egotistically looks down on everyone around him. <Insert aggravated primal scream here>

You can click to zoom in, not that it’s particularly detailed…

You can zoom in on this picture by clicking on it, and there are three close-up images after the break, all of which you can zoom in on as well.

Here’s the meta-code:

   http_get($url)
      retrieve($url)
      if the retrieved data is 404 or otherwise invalid
         retrieve(http://web.archive.org/web/19950101010101/$url

It’s really that easy to create a function that downloads a URL, and if it can’t find it, checks for it on the Wayback Machine!

Specifically, what this does is attempts to download your URL from the standard location. The data retrieved could be “good”, or it could be a “404″ or other standard error, or it could be “bad” data. You’ll find that often expired links do not create obvious failures. An expired link often redirects to the site’s main index, or it may point at sites that are gone or have been completely redesigned and redirect you to any number of locations. Sometimes the easiest way to determine if the retrieved data is “valid” is by checking the file type. For example, in my case I was downloading only images, and if the URL returned anything other than an image I could be pretty sure that it had expired (since few redirect systems are intelligent enough to respect file type). You’ll have to come up with your own way of determining whether the data you downloaded is what you wanted.

If the data downloaded from the original URL is determined to be invalid, you create a new URL that starts with “http://web.archive.org/web/19950101010101/” and is followed by your original URL. So for example, if you were trying to download http://www.zentastic.com/shannon-larratt-is-zentastic.gif and it failed, your Wayback URL would be http://web.archive.org/web/19950101010101/http://www.zentastic.com/shannon-larratt-is-zentastic.gif. Now, that doesn’t mean that the Wayback Machine has to have a version of the file from January 1st, 1995 at 01:01:01. When you request a date that doesn’t exist, it will try and redirect you to the closest one it has. What it will do is give you a “302 Moved Temporarily” with the “correct” URL (which your http-get function should already deal with anyway). Download the URL specified in the “Location” field, and you’ll get the first version of the file stored by the Wayback Machine.

I should note that if you use the URL that I’ve specified above, what you’ll get is the oldest version of the file. The reason I did that is that I figured that if I’m trying to retrieve an old version of the file that is no longer at the URL, the oldest one had the best chance of being the correct one. If on the other hand you want to download the most recent version of the file, you can ask for it with a URL starting with “http://web.archive.org/web/20130101010101/” (ie. January 1st, 2013 instead of 1995). However, depending on the type of file and type of redirect in use, there’s a good chance that the Wayback Machine could be archiving the same junk data that you got and are trying to avoid in the first place. Alternately, if you know the date of the linking entity (for example if it’s a blog or forum post), you could also use that date.

Anyway, I found it was a very easy improvement to my standard http-get function that at least in some cases, improves functionality dramatically! Hope this was helpful to someone.

WHICH I DON’T. ANYWAY…

A while back I made the offhand comment that “Paypal would fly you to space”, and what I was of course talking about there was that PayPal founder Elon Musk took the megamoney he made there and went on to found SpaceX. One of SpaceX’s vehicles is a rocket called the Falcon 9, which advertises a LEO lift capacity of 23,050 pounds (a hair over 10,000kg, or a little less than half the Space Shuttle, or a less than a tenth the size of America’s retired massive Saturn V rocket) and is their largest lift vehicle. More importantly perhaps, it is as I write this the most economical and competitive launch system (much to the chagrin of China’s Long March rockets which had hoped to compete). But what is that “cheap” price? The cost per full launch of the Falcon 9 is a minimum of $54 million, or over $5000 per kilogram to LEO. Frankly I am not impressed, but lets look a little closer at those costs.

First of all, the Falcon 9 is not currently reusable, and so can only be used once. SpaceX is naturally working to make the Falcon 9 reusable in the future because it should reduce launch costs. Elon Musk has said that with enough launches the cost per launch could be reduced by a factor of one thousand — which would be remarkable. Of course, he still has to pay off the $300 million in development costs on the Falcon 9, to say nothing of the costs of developing what sounds like a very expensive recovery procedure (the rocket uses a single engine to return to the launch site and lands bottom-down vertically after upper stage separation). I hope that happens, but it’s a difficult problem to solve, and until then, the cost stays at $54 million plus per launch. I was very interested to read that the kerosene and oxygen that the Falcon 9 uses is about $200,000 per launch. So only 0.3% of the cost is fuel — basically nothing. I find that shocking. But I suppose it’s not that different from a car — you spend $20,000 for the vehicle and then a few dollars to drive it a hundred miles. If you had to throw the car away at the end of every trip, either driving would cost a fortune. You’d have to either figure out a way how to reuse your car, or figure out how to build a car at a fraction of the cost.

It’s funny because in SpaceX’s brochure they describe their philosophy as “simplicity, reliability and low cost”, but even they admit that their production delays were caused by the enormous complexity of the project. Those of you (anyone?) who actually slog through these entries know that the 1962 Sea Dragon rocket which had launch costs at the low end of $59 per kilogram or $600 at the high end. Yet the best we can come up with today, sixty years later, is over $5000 a kilogram. Parts of the Sea Dragon design is similar to the Falcon 9 in that the first stage uses the same fuel mixture — kerosene and oxygene. However, the Falcon 9 uses a 3×3 cluster of nine SpaceX Merlin engines of 125,000 pounds thrust, whereas the Sea Dragon uses a ridiculously scaled up single massive 80,000,000 pound thrust engine. They did this not just for “true” simplicity, but also because from a cost point of view, it’s not significantly more expensive to build a big rocket engine than a small rocket engine — the raw materials are not the main cost. The entire Sea Dragon rocket is essentially just a big metal tube, built out of inexpensive sheet metal. Every cost is brought as low as possible, thus the term “Big Dumb Rocket” (which I’ve linked before).

As I mentioned, development work on the Falcon 9 was $300 million. The development cost of a similar engine, this one designed for 250,000 pounds of thrust (twice as big as SpaceX’s Merlin engine), including all testing was $60,000 (in 1966 dollars). Half of that was the cost of building the engine. The best part of the story, which I have to share, is how the engine was built:

“TRW farmed-out the fabrication of the engine and its supporting structure, less the injector that they fabricated themselves, to a “job-shop” commercial steel fabricator located near their facility . The contract price was $8000. Two TRW executives visited the facility to observe the fabrication process. They found only one individual working on the hardware, and when queried, he did not know nor care that he was building an aerospace rocket engine.”

The fuel tanks were fabricated not by some ultra-high-tech space contractor, like they are today, but by a commercial tank builder at a cost of a few dollars per pound of tank weight (a number which would be lower if done in-house of course).

It really drives me nuts. Low cost rocketry is very do-able. We’ve known how to do it since the sixties. And when I say “known how”, I do not mean theoretically like with Project Orion’s nuclear ships. I mean “known how” as in we built the technology and tested it. But as with all things that involved contracts between megacorporations and megagovernments, would they rather sell a rocket for $54 million, or would they rather sell a rocket for $250,000? I know we all know the answer. It really drives me nuts. I so badly want to see cities in space and when I look up at the moon I want it to look like the Earth at night, dotted with the lights of a thousand cities. Am I asking too much of humanity? It just seems to close, so possible, I feel like I can almost touch it.

Maybe my photoshopping is not so impressive but here is what the Earth looks like from the space station. After all, in my fantasy world if you don’t like the way the moon looks at night you can always just look at the Earth from the moon instead. I sure would like to live long enough to help make this a reality.

Everything I’ve mentioned so far in this entry is “down-to-earth” (pardon the inappropriate phrase) technology, but I did want to mention one other issue that’s a bit farther into the theoretical realm. But not so far that we shouldn’t have done it decades ago.

According to NASA, by the time the Shuttle has hit 1,000 mph (which it does in about a minute), it has consumed a million and a half pounds of fuel, or about a third of what it carries. After two minutes, the shuttle is up to 3,000 mph and the solid rocket boosters separate (each of which have over a million pounds of powdered aluminum and ammonium percolate). NASA has floated designs for maglev “rocket sled tracks” capable of accellerating a 500+ ton lift vehicle up to at least Mach 2, using — and this is very important — only currently existing technology. I’m not even talking about more abitious systems like the Star Tram or a Lofstrom loop which are capable of sled-launching cargo (including humans) into orbit using only the acceleration on the track. What I’m talking about is a simple launch assist system that we could build any day we will it. The cost of constructing such a launcher was estimated to be less than $100 million, or about a quarter of the $450 million average it took for a single Space Shuttle launch. I can’t wrap my head around why this wasn’t done. It really feels like a willful conspiracy to keep the costs as high as possible.

Not that willful conspiracies by the wealthy to defraud taxpayers is anything new. In fact, the historical record is such that I’d say that Occam’s razor pretty much demands it.

Finally, you may remember years ago I had a brief interest in the idea of lighter than air yachts, the notion of building luxury airships that would sit in the same market sector as yachts do today. So instead of taking your rich friends out on the sea, you’d go for a cruise over the rain forest, silently drifting fifty feet over the tree tops in a whisper-quiet electrically propelled and computer guided floating pleasure craft. I still think it’s a good idea. But it was brought back to mind when I saw pictures from a Russian 3D artist of a “vacuum ship”:

Blimps float because what they contain — helium generally — is lighter than the ambient air (just like hot air baloons float because the warmer air is the less dense it is). But what’s lighter than helium? The smart-alleck answer is “nothing”. “Nothing” as in literally nothing, as in a vacuum. There is nothing lighter than nothing at all.So that’s what this is. The problem we have is that a vacuum means that the totality of the surrounding atmosphere is crushing the chamber, and it’s extremely difficult to find a material that is strong enough to deal with those forces while still being light enough to float in the air. That said, his design is clever (and you could optimize it by floating a tensigrity balloon inside a geodesic dome) and might actually be more doable than he thinks (in the English translation you can see that he believes no suitable material exists).

Other than that as you can see I made some casts of my teeth (using fast-setting dental alginate to make the mold) to start building some prosthetics for fun. The neat thing is I can see the chips on the sides of my molars from when I bit my tongue barbells. I hate touching the stone/plaster material though, it feels like scratching a chalkboard. Speaking of, I don’t like touching chalk either. Hurts like crazy the way it stimulates the nerves. I’m not sure if everyone feels like that or not? The fire alarm in our building has been malfunctioning so Caitlin and I have had our sleep messed up a bit this week, plus we got food poisoning it seems when we ordered a pizza. Hopefully I am feeling better by Thursday because I’m getting tattooed.

AW FUCK THE ALARM IS GOING OFF RIGHT NOW!!!!!

ARRGHH! I’M GETTING TO HATE THIS BUILDING!

So yeah, go see “The Divide”. You will regret it, but you will thank me for the recommendation.

In much, much, much happier news, I wanted to share with you, with his permission, this amazing tattoo that my friend Karsten in Germany got of my “Owl’s Adventure” painting (which is currently hanging at Badur’s, and you can also get it as a shirt). I like that the artist laid in the yellow sun without an outline. Really love how it turned out!

Also in the pleasant news category, before we left for the movie we released the sparrow that we’ve been nursing back to health. As soon as we opened the roof on his prison-house he happily flew off, did a couple loops, and landed in a nearby tree. He looked great and it was a real joy to know that the effort paid off. I actually think it’s the first time that I’ve nursed a wild animal back to health and then released it into the wild (if you can even call Toronto “the wild”), and I have to say that it is a wonderful feeling. And seriously, if I had watched “The Divide” and not had anything wonderful in my day to offset it, I’m pretty sure I’d be slitting my throat right now.

Other than that I have just started remaking the mold for the two women’s size skull rings a few minutes ago, and while I was at it I also cast a lego guy for fun (the head is double-sided if you’re wondering why it looks backwards). Not sure what my plan is with that, but now I can cast metal lego guys if I want. I did some clay pre-work on the mounting holes so he should actually mate to plastic lego normally. I might also take the product of this mold and carve it a bit and then re-mold the result. We’ll see. It was mostly so that any excess silicone from making the ring molds wouldn’t go to waste. It’s not cheap stuff so I hate having it go to waste.

We have been watching season two of the special effects make-up show Face-Off so I think perhaps now I may make myself some acrylic teeth for fun since Caitlin is off at a friend’s baby’s first birthday party. I’ve been meaning to do that for a long time, and my jaw keeps falling off my head which is shockingly and acutely painful for hours until it settles back into the joint, so I need something to distract me from that. I have always been able to dislocate my jaw at will (which makes a quite horrible noise that seems to deeply disturb those that hear it) and it’s never been painful, but since the muscles in the area started dying they don’t seem to be able to hold the joint together properly any more, mostly on the right side of my face. The same thing happens with my hip, ankle, and knee joints — if I stay in one position for long (if I’m reading or sleeping for example), the joint seems to loosen and separate, which hurts like crazy and is quite a sharp pain as well (whereas I’d describe the muscle pain as “dull”). I imagine from a diagnostic or treatment point of view it falls into the TMJ category of disorder, even though I’m quite certain it’s cause is the main genetic muscle disease. Either way in some ways it’s the worst pain yet because it’s so acute and because it’s so conceptually close to my mind I think.

By the way, the main reason that I bother writing this stuff down is not to share it or to complain, and I’m definitely not looking for feedback — it’s actually been a very useful diagnostic tool in tracking the progress of my issues. I’d actually urge anyone with a progressive disease to keep some sort of a journal, public or not. It’s quite hard to answer questions like “when did this problem start” precisely, especially years after the fact, so having a written and dated record gives your doctors a level of precision that can be extremely helpful. Memory is not as objective as one would like, whereas my blog posts don’t automatically edit themselves retroactively based on my current emotion. Although when I look at some of the embarrassing things I’ve written from time to time, sometimes I wish they would, hahaha!

I wish I was pulling your leg but I’m not. It’s embarrassing, a tattoo artist that’s completely incapable of drawing a skull. I mean, the average child can draw better than that. It’s nuts. It became clear that he was one of these people that can’t draw at all but decided to become a tattoo artist anyway, with the reasoning that the job is mostly tracing (and admittedly it can be — there are many “tattoists” that can lay down a solid piece of flash but can’t draw an original creation to save their life). The second challenge, which was also the first elimination challenge and the one that got him kicked off the show, was a little better but it was still crap. The challenge was to do a cover-up, and he did some foo dog flash (while it seemed like everyone else drew their own custom work) with no changes of his own thrown in. Here’s how that went:

It might not be totally obvious in the photo but the tattoo is completely chewed up and will probably heal poorly, to say nothing of the horribly inconsistent linework (look at the curves and curls), incompetent symmetry, horrible shading, and so on. This guy wouldn’t even be a good tattoo artist in prison.

We’re suckers for reality TV here, I’m sorry to admit, so I’m sure we will keep watching the show. But it does have potential. There are one or two duds remaining to be kicked off, but beyond that, I’d feel confident recommending almost everyone competing to friends looking for a tattoo artist. We’ll see how the “drama” aspect of the show evolves. I suspect that some of them — “Al Fliction” springs to mind — may end up being more embarrassed about their behavior than “B-TAT” was of the tattos he did.

I could also fill pages snarking about Ami James. First of all his so-called “old school” behavior toward his employees is completely reprehensible in my opinion, but given the level of tattooing he does, he’s in no position to be judging (or teaching) others. He’s capable of doing a solid, black-outline, flat traditional tattoo that would have been acceptable in the mid-nineties, but he’s way out of his league in the modern tattoo world and doesn’t seem to be improving. For example, on a recent show a woman came in wanting a custom tattoo of butterflies all over her back. Here’s what he did to her:

I truly hate slagging someone’s tattoos, especially when they have a “deep” emotional meaning or purpose for the wearer, and I’m not going to say it’s an outright crap tattoo, but I will say that it’s a lazy, uninspired, sloppy, poorly thought out, badly laid-out tattoo that is way below the calibre of what people should expect these days. Like I said, this is a tattoo that you’d get from a street-level shop in 1995. Caitlin sums Ami up in one word — “mediocre”. However, he starts ever episode saying that his vision is to have his shop and his artist roster be not just the best in the city, but the best in the world. Tattoos like this are not going to get it to such a level. In fact, they’ll keep it from ever getting there. I feel aweful saying that, I hate being mean to people. But Ami doesn’t seem to have any trouble dishing out criticism on his apprentice, so maybe I am only the truthful voice of karma.

Other than that I had a disquieting day. I was sleeping in the front room of our studio rather than upstairs in the bedroom loft because the stairs are unneccessarily unpleasant. Normally I am an early riser but somehow today I slept until 10:30 and I would have slept longer had Caitlin not woken me up because she was leaving for work. Since then I’ve had a pounding headache, which on one hand is rare for me, but on the other hand I have been having them more often lately, feels like all the time. I can actually barely type and keep misspelling words, more like shuffling the letters into a randomized order, and keep pressing the spacebar in the middle of words. It helps a bit when I close my eyes to type oddly. Maybe I’m imagining that, but I am definitely not imagining how much my head hurts. And I’m sweating like crazy, gross, I know. Still feel dizzy, mentally tired, disoriented, confused, and… well… you know, here’s how I don’t feel: I don’t feel like complaining. So enough of that. Hope I make it through another night, because I still have a lot to do.

I also made a gigantic 16,200×8,400 pixel collage of my paintings and uploaded it to the custom fabric printing site Spoonflower and ordered a couple of yards. I think we’re going to make big floor pillows out of it or something. Not sure. But it’s inexpensive enough to justify the experiment. If it turns out nicely I may do some more with it. I’m also slowly chugging away on some software that converts my WordPress blog (or anyone’s I suppose) into big journals suitable for on-demand printing. I’m looking forward to turning my blog into a book. I was actually thinking that someone should write a Facebook app that at the end of the year takes all the photos you uploaded that year, arranges them into a scrapbook with people’s comments and all that, uploads it to an on-demand print company, and sends you this awesome yearbook. I’m sure there are millions of people who’d absolutely love to have that sort of 21st century photo album. Maybe this already exists. If it doesn’t, maybe I should write it… Unfortunately I have more good ideas than time.

One of the “problems” with our current roster of space ships and space stations is that they’re built to be as light as possible due to the extreme per-kilogram cost of lifting things into orbit and beyond. You can practically punch your way out the side of the International Space Station, and the entire space station, three hundred and sixty feet long (the length of an NFL football field), two hundred and forty feet wide, and almost seventy feet tall only weights as much as 280 of my truck (which is not particularly heavy at 1,600kg) even though you could park over seven hundred of them in its shadow. I know I’m being a little loose with my comparison because it’s not a solid mass and much of that space is solar panels, but point is, it’s built as light as we could get away with building it. I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to spend time in a kill-you-real-quick environment as hostile as outer space, to say nothing of bombardment of micrometeorites, I’d rather be in something built like a tank or a U-boat than something built like a tin-foil pie plate.

What we have versus what we should have?

As I’m sure you know, the ISS was built in orbit, which arguably increased the complexity and risk and cost of construction. This is because, as the ESA website points out the obvious, we don’t have a launch vehicle big enough to lift its entire 450 ton mass into space in a single launch. Almost exclusively we used the Space Shuttle, which can could lift an admirable 24,000kg to low earth orbit at a go. So far it has taken 31 separate launches with more scheduled. While the official cost to date of the ISS is $150 billion, with 27 Shuttle launches, 2 Proton, and 2 Soyuz launches, I’d ballpark that the cost of the launches alone — not including the cost of developing the launch vehicles (for context a Space Shuttle costs) — was probably somewhere in the realm of $12 billion dollars. For context that’s less than a month of Iraq war spending, and the cost of building the Space Shuttle Endeavor was $1.7 billion, or about 80% of the cost of a B-2 Stealth Bomber. When you look at it that way it didn’t really cost a whole lot. That said, as long as it is a logistical nightmare to lift stuff into space, it’s dubious whether we’re really ever going to do anything all that exciting, at least until there’s a commercial interest.

Flying skyscrapers… These things are about 350 feet tall!

The biggest heavy launch vehicle we ever built was the Saturn V rocket that lifted the Apollo missions (above left). The Saturn V was able to lift an incredible 120,000kg into LEO at a cost of $185 million in 1965, or $1.1 billion in 2012 dollars. Using the Saturn V we could have lifted the ISS (and then some) in just four launches — or four and a half billion dollars, about a third the cost of the “modern” systems we used. We have had much larger launch vehicles on the drawing board, but for largely political reasons — it certainly wasn’t technical reasons — they never ended up happening. To understand why, peek over at the Soviet space program of the sixties. They also had a moon shot, and a lot of people thought that they were going to beat America there because of their many space firsts — first ICBM, first satellite, first animal in orbit (and later the first ones to return alive), first telemetry from space, first moon probe, first images of the far side of the moon, first person in space, first Venus probe, first EVA, first lunar orbit, first space docking, and so on, and all of that happened before the Americans got to the moon. In some ways their moon program was smaller and less ambitious than the American one — it was certainly much lighter, which meant a less impressive rocket was needed — but this was mostly because of the fact that their main focus was Mars. They didn’t end up going with the smaller rocket that their moon proram needed, but instead worked on a rocket similar to the Saturn V called the N1 (above right), initially sized in 1959 to be large enough to carry their TMK-1 manned Mars mission (which also included a flyby of Venus on the way home) scheduled for 1971. Unfortunately after the Soviets exploded four N1s (one of the explosions still stands as the biggest non-nuclear kaboom we’ve ever created), they never made it to the moon let alone Mars. As a result, the space race lost a lot of its steam and the Americans stopped going to the moon, canned their own Mars program, and a million geek hears broke.

Because the Americans kicked the ambition out of their space program and decided to invest in the Vietnam war instead, they closed down NASA’s Future Projects Branch which was developing a number of heavy launch vehicles intended for the Mars program. The one that is most exciting to me is a gigantic rocket called the “Sea Dragon” (above) because it also seems the most realistic, both for back then and for what should be dusted off today. The Sea Dragon is an interesting rocket not just because it’s incredibly powerful, capable of lifting 550 tons into LEO — that is, the entire current International Space Station plus another hundred tons for good measure — but also because it’s wildly inexpensive. TRW estimated numbers as low as $59 a pound — compare that to about $750 a kilogram in the dollars of the day for the Saturn V. The reason it was so cheap is that a significant percentage of the cost of a rocket is that it’s a highly complex piece of advanced engineering using advanced materials built to precise tolerances and expensive fuels. And then gets wrecked after launch. Also, the costs are such that the raw materials are only about 2% of the final cost, so the price difference between rockets of different sizes is much less than intuition would suggest. So the Sea Dragon was built with the philosophy that it should be as big and as low tech as possible. The whole thing was just a giant steel sheet metal tube 550 feet long. It had one gigantic engine fueled by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen (which also meant that it was clean, producing only steam as exhaust) and forced through the system by compressed nitrogen (ie. compressed air basically). The rocket was water launched, and the fuel — oxygen and hydrogen — was produced on site by splitting water into its component hydrogen and oxygen. The plan at the time was to do this with electricity supplied by a nuclear aircraft carrier, but if we were going to resurrect the idea in modern times, I’m sure we would just use wind generators. Sad that this isn’t going on. What a different world we might live in if we could inexpensively lift space stations and moon bases in a single launch. But I suppose we have wars to pay for.

Gawd damn. I hate thinking about the trillion dollar price-tag on the Iraq war. We could have colonized both the moon and Mars for those dollars. I mean, what makes more sense? Killing a bunch of Arabs? Or having thriving human civilizations on three worlds? I know, I know… it’s killing Arabs, right?

They are Muslims after all!

There are so many interesting launch vehicles I could go on about — there’s a nice list, including some speculative and fictional ones, here on the Atomic Rockets Surface-to-Orbit site. I love reading about crazy mega-rockets like Nexus (above picture includes a model) that could lift 900 tons in “normal” mode or almost 5,000 tons when spewing nuclear pollution. Dream big, dream dirty. I love the quote (from the first link in this paragraph) about the Aldebaran launch vehicle that was supposed to be able to lift 60 million pounds — “water take off and landing because there isn’t a runway in the world that could survive that monster.” Ah, back in the days when engineers when men.

Now, $60 a pound is pretty impressive, but it’s not the best we can do. That would be Project Orion. We did the on-paper and early testing (including accidentally) for this nuclear pulse launch system that was capable of much, much heavier weights for a much lower cost, but again for political reasons (very different ones this time) it was scrubbed. What I’m about to write is not a typo. We are talking launch systems capable of lifting as much as 4,880,000,000kg… Yes, five billion kilograms into orbit and for well under a dollar a kilogram. Even the “small” versions, which were about the same size physically as the Saturn V rocket were capable of tossing 1,600,000kg into orbit, or 1,200,00kg to the moon, or 800,000kg all the way to Mars with enough fuel left over to get back in a single go. That’s unheard of. It basically means that in a single launch you could throw twenty of the largest cruise ships in the world to the moon. I’ll admit that the way it does it is a little problematically. Your cargo sits on a platform, which sites on top of immense shock absorbers, which sits on top of a giant pusher plate, under which five hundred to a thousand nuclear bombs are detonated in rapid sequence (given the size of our nuclear arsenal, you could argue that using up the fuel instead of letting it rot makes a lot of sense — sure makes more sense than the intended purpose). I have to repeat that this is not theoretical — Freeman Dyson, who headed the project, got it to the testing phase, which you can read about in a great book written by his son or watch in “To Mars by A-Bomb (The Secret History of Project Orion)” that I just noticed some SOPA-antagonizer has uploaded to YouTube and all sorts of other direct-download sites. Highly recommended.

(Those pictures are from DRB’s coverage of Orion.)

Anyway, the short version as to the politics of it all surrounds the fact that it was nuclear bomb powered, which came with three big problems. First of all, it made it a military venture. Second of all, it made it highly classified, and made doing the required research on clean nukes and so on extremely difficult to sell to politicians. This was compounded by the fact that America’s space program had been put under the largely public civilian agency NASA. And finally, when America signed off on the Partial Test Ban in 1963 stopping above-ground nuclear detonations, it effectively shut down the program. There was a brief period in the fifties where America was debating whether to go with chemical rockets or nuclear rockets, and I have to wonder what space would look like if weight requirements were simply a non-issue. What would it be like if we could launch a small city in a single shot? If we could dump whole collections of factories on the any moon or planet in our solar system. And don’t get me started on the interstellar possibilities — Project Daedalus, a mission to Barnard’s Star, was based on similar technology, and Dyson considered a trip to Alpha Centauri since Orion could potentially get there in less than fifty years. It’s both inspiring and heartbreaking.

I will mention that we have actually recently dusted off the nuclear pulse technology because it’s the only thing we have that could push an extinction-level sized asteroid out of an impact path.

Up above I said that nothing interesting would happen in space until there’s a commercial imperative, and that wasn’t just a throwaway sentence. Multiple big mining companies are now seriously eyeballing both the moon and the asteroids. On one hand that sounds nutty, but on the other hand, mining already costs a small fortune. A big oil rig costs a half billion dollars, which is way less than Space Adventures private moon flyby mission is costing them. Big mining equipment costs a fortune — $150 million plus for some of the big excavators and draglines — and billions are spent on exploration alone, let alone the many, many trillions spent on mineral extraction itself. The dollars spent on mining right now dwarf the Apollo program’s cost. Hell, they dwarf the amount of money spent by every nation on space, ever. NASA and others are currently putting more and more serious feelers out to determine the exact mining value of the moon, but as soon as we can make a solid gamble at it, be it for precious metals, rare elements, or even Helium3 once we figure out fusion, there will be dozens of mega-corporations scrambling to loot the moon. And then it snowballs. In many ways — to say nothing of environmental issues — mining the moon and the asteroids is less problematic than mining the ocean. And all we have to do is get a couple mining operations up there, with factories and processing facilities, and boom, all of a sudden we have colonized the moon. Even if we never build a modern Sea Dragon or Orion, and we have PayPal fly up the first factories bit by bit in their new Falcon heavy-lift rockets, after a short while we won’t have to carry stuff up there — we can just build it with the moon’s own resources. And then maybe moon mining will discover arcologies from the past, right? Now that would be exciting.

That picture is completely UN-ambitious. Fail.

It’s gonna happen and it’s gonna happen soon. Stuff like this makes me really wish I was going to live longer and really excited about the kind of world my daughter is going to get to be a part of. World? I spoke wrong. The kind of worlds she’s going to get to be a part of.

Worlds. I like that.

Yesterday I started a new pain group — CBT to be specific. Isn’t that funny? Of course the first thing I thought was “Cock and Ball Torture” but in this case it actually means “Cognitive Behavior Therapy” or something, basically adjusting your thinking so that you deal with pain better. I’m not too sure whether it will be helpful to me because all things considered I’m a remarkably positive person and think I have a pretty good attitude about the pain from my condition. That said, the doctors have pretty much run out of treatment options so before I either drop dead or go jump off the Golden Gate Bridge because I’m sick of living like this — and believe me, there are a great many days when that seems like the sensible thing to do — I figure I ought to explore every single long-shot option that might help. So for three incredibly boring and unpleasant hours twice a week I’m stuck in a room hanging out with other chronic pain sufferers obsessing over the worst part of our lives. Personally I’m having some trouble seeing how it’s helpful because every time I have to talk about pain I end up feeling like shit for the next day or two. I’d much rather be out doing something that’s as far removed from obsessing on pain as possible.

There was a fair amount of whining from other patients about how they can’t do anything because the pain is holding them back and it seems insurmountable and they’re always exhausted because they can’t sleep due to the pain, and on and on and on. I told them that I could relate to what they were saying — it really is a very easy hole to fall into, that pit of despair that seems more difficult to get out of the longer you stay there — but that it was bullshit and they weren’t doing themselves any favors. I think I have had periods where I’ve been like that, but when I finally got my diagnosis and realized that, while I didn’t have a traditionally “terminal” disease like nasty cancers, I did have a finite amount of quality life left. Every hour that went by was an hour less of functional life I had left. I guess in a way that’s true for every one of us, but for me it was made much more real when I was told that the time remaining was quite short and there wasn’t a damn think anyone could do about it. So I said to myself that until the day I couldn’t take the pain and other symptoms any more that I was going to squeeze out every bit of life that I had left. With less and less time left, there is more and more that I want to do. I try and value every moment. I know there are things I’m working on that I won’t see to completion, but nonetheless I am going to push at them with passion. While it is true that since making that decision my condition has gotten worse… much worse… at the same time, every step I take makes taking the next step a little easier. Or at least it reminds me that I am able to take the step.

So I tried to explain that to the people expressing hopelessness. Mostly what they got out of it was how horrible it is to have a condition that is undiagnosed — I guess the main thing they heard was that it got better for me after I had a diagnosis. I’d say that 80% of the people in the group, if not more, have either an undiagnosed or “vaguely diagnosed” condition, or a condition that is dianosed but should not normally be painful, which is emotionally the same thing. Now, it is true that getting a diagnosis is wonderful, because when you don’t have a diagnosis, not only are you treated badly by the medical community — they wonder openly if you’re just drug seeking, or if you have a psychiatric condition — but you’re also treated similarly by your friends and family who can’t see the invisible grim reaper that’s pulling you down into the abyss. But worst of all, you start to second guess yourself. But anyway, maybe that moment of “I can do it” is just something you have to do for yourself on your own schedule. Kind of like beating depression. It’s true that in the end the answer is simple “snap out of it!”, but it doesn’t do you any good to have other people say that to you. You have to figure out how to say it to yourself and really mean it.

It is interesting though hearing some people’s stories. Obviously out of respect for their privacy there’s very little I can repeat, but almost a quarter of the group members are TTC streetcar drivers!!! Not only that, but they all have post-traumatic stress disorder, and all the aweful psychiatric disorders that cluster around PTSD, which they tell me is worse for transit workers than police or firefighters. The stories of commonplace assaults were shocking. One of them is actually there because he was doing a rear door loading on a streetcar, and a woman in a car behind the streetcar was angry about having to wait for him. He has minor spinal bifida so he already has back problems and moves slowly, but it was made so much worse because this woman, instead of just screaming or honking, actually rammed him (as in his human body with her car) repeatedly. When he fell down on the ground, she got out of her car and started beating him and trying to drag him out of her way. Crazy. To make matters worse and really push it into PTSD territory, no one on the streetcar or sidewalk stepped up to help. They just sat there and eagerly watched, and when the police finally showed up, not a single person was willing to provide a witness statement. Terrible story if it’s even partially accurate. Everyone in the group has a hard-luck story in one way or another, even the whiners. I guess for some people it is comforting to know that they’re not alone, but for me it just makes me sad.

In more positive healing-of-the-broken news, the little bird we rescued may actually make it through. For the first week he spent most of his time lying on his side with his head usually tucked down. It seemed like he actually could not hold his head up at all, and as if his neck was broken it would just sort of roll around randomly. Very disturbing. We were pretty sure he’d suffered brain damage because his behavior was so messed up. He would also spasticly jump-slash-roll around and it seemed like he was completely out of control of his behavior. However, I am happy to say that he does seem to be getting stronger — and he has been eating and drinking regularly — and today for the first time seems to be able to hold his head up and look around. I am beginning to think we will be able to successfully release him back into the wild, which is good because I was getting concerned that all I had achieved was extending the torment of a severely injured half dead little lifeform…

Of course, I’ve done such massive quantities of acid while listening to that song that it does always make me feel a little strange. University was an unhealthy or at least dangerous time for me, albeit a period of great growth.

Now I also must promote that I have finally popped the last dozen skull rings that I’ve made, all special in one way or another, into my Etsy shop. The first one in the picture set has a pair of star sapphire cabochons for eyes and they look amazing. The next two in the top row are my “failed” prototypes from the women’s sizes, so they’re in a size 7 and 7.5 if I remember right — the one has sort of a mutant mongoloid look, and the other one makes me think of an alien in Mars Attacks with those big moonstone eyes. They’re the only ones I’ll be making in the short term because I have to fix the molds (that’s why they’re wonky). Click the picture to jump to the shop’s skull ring section for more info.

I will try and add some soap and candles and more stuff tomorrow.

Finally I wanted to end with one more video that I thought was great, this dystopian surfing through the apocalypse video… It really makes for an amazing movie trailer or teaser piece, but it seems to be just something that a guy made to show off his skills (or to promote a camera, I’m not sure).

And now to make a phone call for a reservation so I can take Caitlin out to dinner!

Right now we’ve built him a makeshift safehouse here in the studio out of a giant box, and have been giving him water and lots of food that he’s seeming to eat in decent quantity. And shooting out the other end as well, which I take as a good sign for his survivability. On the other hand, he can’t really stand up and sort of just rolls around so he’s very pathetic and sad looking at the moment. We weren’t sure if he was even going to make it through the first night here but he does seem to be doing a little better. Fingers crossed for him. As soon as he seems well enough to fly he’s back out into the wild. Maybe we’ve given him a chance. I’m guessing that he smucked a window and was stunned and then maybe got clipped by a passing car or something. It doesn’t look like he was attacked.

I wonder if he has bird friends who are wondering where he is…

Other than that, yes, I did make it out to the post office with a small mountain of skull rings and goodies to mail. I’ll try and update the shop tomorrow with cool new stuff as well. I made a set of new molds for the “women’s” size skull rings (sizes 6 through 9) but I made an error and they are deformed so I have to remake them tomorrow. But I might put the two funny quasimodos up anyway. I’m going to set the eyes and see how they look first. I felt a bit bad at the post office because some people who were there to just send single things had to wait for half an hour as all my stuff was processed. I’d have let them go in front, but this post office is small and only has one computer so they couldn’t (as far as I know) pause my processing. Still, I didn’t deserve their dirty looks in my opinion!

Before leaving though I poured some quick soap in the new molds I cured last night — a skull soap, and a Zentastic promo soap. I will put some of these in the shop in the next couple days ($5 seems to be the going rate for hobby soap, so I guess that seems like a reasonable place to price it, although it might end up being less), but I think I’m going to put them into orders by regular customers and large orders for free as a thank-you gift. Here are the two bars that I made, cast in a goats milk soap with slight peppermint scent.

In addition to the goats milk, I also cast them in a clear soap (also peppermint):

Per Caitlin’s suggestion I’ll do some experiments with speckling in red blood in various ways. We’re debating whether it’s better to drip the “blood” (which will just be a deep red tinted soap) when it’s all liquid (Caitlin’s thought), or to splatter it into the mold first (my thought), then let it harden (maybe even freeze it to make it resilient) and then pour the bone colour on second. Both will be tried.

Other than that we have temporarily adopted a sparrow that broke its wing. We’re not sure if it’s beyond saving but we are doing our best. Assuming the horrible cat does not figure out a way to eat it in the night I will report more tomorrow on our little friend.

I realize that with the opening and closing teasers, it is apparent to everyone that I have posted pictures of the least interesting part of my day. I’m sorry, but for now it’s the only part that I’ve photographed. I will amend it tomorrow. Tomorrow will not be an entry containing only a picture of me going to the post office, even though I am planning the ammunition for that.

Fullscreen is the best.

Also if you’re in the watching mood, I’ve been enjoying the videos on TommyEdisonXP’s YouTube channel which document his life as a blind man — ever wonder how a blind person cooks food? Uses an ATM? Sets up a DVD player? There aren’t a ton of videos but hopefully he’ll make more. The cooking one is especially good.

Yesterday Caitlin and I walked down to Kensington Market to have a Big Fat Burrito which was delicious as always. The walk was about 8km in all, which while a decent length walk for anyone, seems to be about my upper limit these days, down from almost double that a month ago. I don’t know if that’s because of the damage I did climbing all the zip line towers in Mexico, or if it’s just part of the normal decay and destruction. I feel like I had a couple months where I was feeling alright, but now I’m back to pretty much constant unbearable pain. Tomorrow I start a new pain treatment program that I have mixed feelings about, and they’re supposed to stick me in a CT scanner soon to see how the brain damage aspect of the disease is progressing. I’ve actually been doing a ton of programming lately (as in software development) to try and keep myself from going nuts from the pain — doing data processing and analysis and simple AI work seems to pull me out of the physical and keep my mind broadly occupied better than just about anything else I’ve found.

Back to nice stuff. As I said, I’ve had lots of people with dainty fingers asking me to do a skull ring that’s appropriately sized for them. So I have been making roughs for a potential new skull ring or two. The ones in the picture are size 6 and 7, and can be up-sized to a 9. I’m also making them all with gem-set eyes, which is why the eyes are hollow. I like the way the gem-set eyes look so much that in this run they’ll be that way by default. I hope to have the molds made for these in the next few days, and I just got shipping notice that I’ll have some new cabochons later in the week in addition to the gems I already have here.

Finally, I wanted to share with you a little experiment I did the other day for making quick one-offs. I discovered that the “melting point” of plastecine is high enough that you can actually pour liquid pewter into it. The pewter that I use melts at the incredibly low temperature of 138 degrees Celsius — not much more than boiling water amazingly! I found that you can take your positive (in this case a little fairy figuring wearing goggles) and press it into the plasticine to make your mold. I also put in a little graphite to reduce air bubbles, although I didn’t do enough tests to be sure how big a difference it makes. The pewter then, melted stove top, is poured right into the depression in the plasticine and allowed to harden there. To my surprise, it works perfectly. For applications like making one-off coins or medals for a kid’s party and things like that, this seems like an ideal zero-cost method. The pewter can be bought for around $20 a pound (or you can just melt down broken pewter cups from a used/junk shop), and that’s the only special item you need!

Perhaps I will write a tutorial some time.

Other than that Caitlin and I have been watching the “Face Off” SyFy reality show which is pretty fun. It’s one of those “Top Chef”/”Project Runway” type contest reality shows, but it’s about theatrical and special effects makeup. The second season starts soon, so we grabbed the entire first season to watch over a couple days and have just one episode left. There’s a lot in the show that overlaps with the sort of jewelry work I do because of all the mold making, so it’s interesting to me on a first-hand level.

These next ones are 8mm rainbow topaz and are also quite intense — they are iridescent across various blue, green, and turquoise tones that are hard to capture in a still photo.

These blue or deep cyan stones are a pair of 8mm simulated blue zircon.

Next is the actual stone that was ordered, a pair of 8mm black spinels. Totally black and opaque.

Also in black, I ordered a bunch of 8mm high dome black onyx round cabochons, which are basically half spheres. I got these largely as an experiment as I’ve never worked with them before, and wow, do I ever love them. They really look incredible. I made a couple of rings using them as eyes that’ll go into the shop in the next day or two.

In addition, I have started mounting cabochon’s on the backs of these rings whenever possible, inside my “signature” tattoo logo. It’s a very beautiful touch, and I feel like my work is getting better and better with time.

I have some more cabochons on order, so in a week or so I hope to do some more experiments. I have some really neat looking pyrite ones, some blood red almandine garnets, some green malachite, some very psychedelic glittering opal, some turquoise chrysocolla that looks like a planet, some pearly moonstone, and some stunning lab-grown star sapphires. Finally, because I have had so many requests to do a version of this skull ring but in a smaller women’s size, I’m beginning work today on a new skull ring that should fit sizes 6 through 9 (the rings about are size 10 through 13).